July Over The Edge Writers’ Gathering presents readings by Siobhan Campbell, Frankie Gaffney, Catherine Hunter, David E. Butler, Teresa Sweeney, & Lisa Frank

The July Over The Edge Writers’ Gathering presents an exciting variety of poetry, fiction, and drama by Siobhan Campbell, Frankie Gaffney, Catherine Hunter, David E. Butler, Teresa Sweeney, & Lisa Frank. The event will take place on Thursday, July 13th, 6.30pm at Galway City Library, St. Augustine Street. All are welcome. There is no cover charge.

Siobhán Campbell was born in Dublin, she is a graduate of University College, Dublin. She spent a number of years in New York and San Francisco and worked as Managing Editor of Wolfhound Press before joining Faculty at Kingston University in London. Widely published in the USA and UK, she has won awards in the National, Troubadour and Wigtown International competitions. Her most recent poetry collection Heat Signature was published by Seren earlier this year. 

Frankie Gaffney grew up in the Dublin's North Inner-City. His first novel, Dublin Seven, published by Liberties Press to critical acclaim, charts a young man's descent into the criminal underworld of the city. The Irish Times described it as “Ulysses meets Love/Hate”.

Catherine Hunter is a Canadian poet, novelist, editor and professor. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Necessary Crimes and Latent Heat, which received the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year in 1997. She is also the author of three literary mysteries: Queen of Diamonds, The Dead of Midnight and Where Shadows Burn. She is a professor of English at the University of Winnipeg. 

David E Butler is a widely performed playwright, author, and retired congregational minister from Maine who is currently resident in County Clare. 

Teresa Sweeney is from county Galway. She was short listed in the 2014 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year competition. Her fiction has been published in Roadside Fiction, Number Eleven Magazine, Wordlegs, Boyne Berries and she was a runner up in the WOW! Awards 2011. She was a Featured Reader at the November 2014 Over The Edge: Open Reading and was selected to read at the 2015 Cúirt Over The Edge New Writers’ Showcase reading. 

Lisa Frank was born and raised in Los Angeles but lived in the Pacific Northwest for several years before moving to Ireland in 2007. She won second place in the 2016 Francis MacManus Award and was a joint-winner of the 2015 Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair competition. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University (where Paula Meehan also received her MFA) and is the editor of Galway Stories, featuring many of Ireland’s best fiction writers, including Kevin Barry, Mary Costello and Mike McCormack. Having taught creative writing in a variety of settings, including a mens’ prison, she now lives in Connemara with her partner and is co-director of Doire Press.

Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Arts Council,

Poetry Ireland, and Galway City Council.

Westside Arts Festival/Over The Edge Summer Open-mic

PROBABLY THE BIGGEST LITERARY OPEN-MIC OF THE YEAR

Over The Edge in association with Westside Arts Festival presents the 2017 Over The Edge Summer Open-mic at Westside Library, Seamus Quirke Road on Wednesday, July 12^th, 6-8pm

Everyone who has a poem or story to share is most welcome to take part. So, if you have some writing you’d like to read to an audience, this is your opportunity to do so.  

Those taking part will include visiting students studying creative writing on this year’s NUI Galway International Summer School.

The MC for the evening will be Kevin Higgins. 

All are welcome to attend.

Over The Edge acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council, Poetry Ireland, and Galway City Council. 

June Over The Edge Writers’ Gathering presents readings by Karen McDonnell, Eamonn Lynskey, Anne Tannam, & Maeve Mulrennan & Galway launch of short story collection by June Caldwell

June Over The Edge Writers’ Gathering presents readings by Karen McDonnell, Eamonn Lynskey, Anne Tannam, & Maeve Mulrennan & the Galway launch of June Caldwell’s debut short story collection. The event will take place on Thursday, June 29th, 8pm at the Kitchen @ The Museum, Spanish Arch, Galway. All are welcome. There is no cover charge.

June Caldwell worked for many years as a freelance journalist and now writes fiction. Room Little Darker, a short story collection, was published by New Island Books in May 2017. Her short story ‘SOMAT’ was published in the award-winning anthology The Long Gaze Back, edited by Sinéad Gleeson and was chosen as a ‘favourite’ by The Sunday Times. She’s a prizewinner of the Moth International Short Story Prize and has been shortlisted for many others, including the Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Colm Toíbín International Short Story Award, the Lorian Hemingway Prize, and the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University Belfast, and lives in Dublin.

June Caldwell

Bred, buttered and living in Dublin, Anne Tannam's first book of poetry Take This Life, was published by WordsOnTheStreet in 2011. Her second collection Tides ShiftingAcross My Sitting Room Floor is just published by Salmon Poetry. A spoken word artist, Anne has performed her work at Lingo, Electric Picnic, Cuirt and other festivals around Ireland and is co-founder of the renowned Dublin Writers' Forum.

Eamonn Lynskey’s poetry first appeared in the New Irish Writing pages of the Irish Press in the 1980s, edited by David Marcus, and since then widely in magazines and journals such Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, The SHOp, Crannóg, The Stony Thursday Book, The Stinging Fly, Boyne Berries, Orbis, Riposte Broadsheet and the Irish Times. He was a finalist in the Strokestown International Poetry Competition and in the Hennessy Awards. He has been involved in the organization of poetry events in Dublin for many years and has presented poetry programmes on local radio. He obtained an M. Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin in 2012 and participated in the 2013 Stanza Poetry Festival in St. Andrews in Scotland. Before retirement he worked as a teacher and Adult Education organizer.  Eamonn’s third collection of poetry, It’s Time, is just published by Salmon Poetry.

Maeve Mulrennan is a curator and writer based in Galway. She is the Head of Visual Art + Education in Galway Arts Centre, where she has worked since 2006. This role includes exhibitions, critical writing, residencies and education programming. In 2008 she founded Red Bird Youth Collective, which is now a youth led art collective working in visual art, architecture, animation and film. Maeve has been on the Board of Directors of Tulca Festival of Visual Art since 2006. Maeve lectures on the MA Arts Policy & Practice in Huston School of Digital Media, NUI Galway and is an online-Lecturer with NODE Center for Curatorial Studies, Berlin. Maeve is a short story writer, with fiction published in several online journals, The Doire Press 2013 Anthology and The Galway Review. She read at the 2012 Cúirt Festival / Over The Edge showcase reading.

Karen J. McDonnell grew up in Ennis. She spent many years in Dublin working in international banking and as an actress before returning to live in the Burren in north Clare. As a mature student at NUI Galway, she focused increasingly on writing, including Notes from the Margins, a poetic song cycle about women on the edges of history, and literary non-fiction: Unsettled — a West Bank Journal. She won the 2014 WOW Poetry Award and was runner up in the 2015 Wild Atlantic Words and the 2015 Baffle poetry competitions. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Poems for Patience Award. Karen’s debut collection of poems This Little World is just published by Doire Press.

Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Arts Council,

Poetry Ireland, and Galway City Council.

May Over The Edge: Open Reading with Eileen Battersby, Kathryn Guille, & Chris Connolly

The May ‘Over The Edge: Open Reading’ takes place in Galway City Library on Thursday, May 25^th, 6.30-8.00pm. The Featured Readers are Eileen Battersby, Chris Connolly, & Kathryn Guille. There will as usual be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished. New readers are especially welcome. 

Kathryn Guille

Kathryn Guille is an American writer and choreographer living in Limerick City. Her screenplay, Enemy of the Freak State, has won the David Dortort Prize for Screenwriting, and her play, Venla and Henry has won the Alice Stark Award for Playwriting. Kathryn is a founding member of the New York Time’s acclaimed Ateh Theatre Group. She was an Off-Broadway and regional fight director and actress for over ten years before moving to Ireland. Kathryn holds a BFA from NYU’s TISCH School of the Arts, and an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York. Kathryn was the winner of the 2016 Cúirt New Writing Poetry Prize. She is now a participant in the Thursday afternoon Advanced Poetry Workshop at Galway Arts Centre.

Chris Connolly

Chris Connolly writes fiction and was born in Dublin in 1983. In 2016, for his short stories, he won both the RTE Francis McManus Award and the Hennessy Award for Emerging Fiction. He is also the 2016 Over The Edge New Writer of the Year and this featured reading is part of prize. Novelist Niamh Boyce, who judged the 2016 Over The Edge New Writer of the Year and chose Chris as her overall winner, had this about his winning story: ‘There's no one new around you’,  showed an awareness of form usually found in poetry and applied it to a short story. It worked because it expressed the tensions within the story, the tensions in life to conform, to contain something that cannot be contained

Eileen Battersby

Eileen Battersby is literary correspondent of the Irish Times. She has written about all aspects of the arts, particularly classical music and literature, as well as archaeology, historical geography and architectural history and has championed fiction in translation. Four times winner of the Arts Journalist of the Year award, she has most recently won the Critic of the Year. Her first novel Teethmarks On My Tongue was published late last year by Dalkey Archive Press to very favourable reviews by, among others, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Edmund White in The Huffington Post. 

As usual there will be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished. New readers are always most welcome at the open-mic. The MC for the evening will be Susan Millar DuMars. For further details phone 087-6431748.

Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing generous financial support of Galway City Council, Poetry Ireland & The Arts Council.